Jon Gruden

1 Aaron Brooks and Michael Vick both open the season firmly entrenched as the starting quarterback for their teams. Brooks, armed with a new contract, leads a New Orleans Saints group that faded at the end of last season. Vick gets a chance to prove to the Atlanta Falcons that all the hype is justified. 2 Emmitt Smith resumes his march toward the all-time rushing record as the Dallas Cowboys visit Houston for the Texans' regular-season debut. Smith is 540 yards away from ex-Chicago Bears star Walter Payton's mark of 16,726 yards.

Gaines Adams, an All-American defensive end at Clemson whose career never blossomed in the NFL with Chicago and Tampa Bay, died Sunday after going into cardiac arrest. He was 26. He died at Self Regional Hospital after going into cardiac arrest about an hour before at his family's home in Greenwood, said Marcia Kelley-Clark, chief deputy coroner for Greenwood County. An autopsy showed an enlarged heart, a condition that can often lead to a heart attack, Kelley-Clark added.

The NFL enters the annual "tough love" portion of the schedule, when 37.5 percent of teams begin the single-elimination phase and the remaining 62.5 percent pillory the scapegoats and slackers that ended their seasons. Purges nearly always begin with head coaches, since the owners, no matter their shortcomings, possess the power of the checkbook, and pink-slipping players is an immense administrative hassle during the holidays. Monday saw the dismissal of Detroit's Rod Marinelli, Cleveland's Romeo Crennel and the Jets' Eric Mangini, with more almost certainly on the way. Marinelli and Crennel were casualties of their teams' profound stink-i-tude.

At first and second and third they didn't succeed, so the Tampa Bay Buccaneers are going to try again to beat the Philadelphia Eagles in Veterans Stadium. Q: What's the point? A: Points, the Bucs hope. They haven't scored an offensive TD the last three times. That's why they spent two No. 1 draft choices, two No. 2 draft choices and $8 million to get coach Jon Gruden. Q: This is the last game for Veterans Stadium. What makes it so special? A: "The smell of beer," Eagles guard John Welbourn said.

If Helen of Troy had a face that could launch 1,000 ships, Jon of Tampa had a scowl Sunday that could have sunk them all. It came when cornerback Dwight Smith got a personal foul for body-slamming a Cleveland receiver. Jon Gruden didn't exactly agree with the call, and the look on his face could have hung in the Modern Museum of Disgusted Art. "We're like a bunch of pit bulls on defense," Smith said. "And he's like a pit bull." Gruden has made his modeling reputation as the coaching version of Chucky.

While folks in Tampa Bay's environs chortle and make plans for a Sunday celebration, Gerry Fraley, writing in the Morning News, asks those in Dallas to ponder this about the Cowboys' new coach: "What was Bill Parcells thinking?" His point, a good one, is that Parcells was the Bucs' coach for something less than 48 hours last January, signed and sealed but never delivered because he asked for a couple of days to drive from New Jersey before the announcement. Maybe it was on the New Jersey Turnpike.

Gaines Adams, an All-American defensive end at Clemson whose career never blossomed in the NFL with Chicago and Tampa Bay, died Sunday after going into cardiac arrest. He was 26. He died at Self Regional Hospital after going into cardiac arrest about an hour before at his family's home in Greenwood, said Marcia Kelley-Clark, chief deputy coroner for Greenwood County. An autopsy showed an enlarged heart, a condition that can often lead to a heart attack, Kelley-Clark added.

The Daily Press scopes out news, notes and fun stuff about sports: Water? Big deal. Fairway bunker. So what? Trees? Rough? Hah. The real hazards at the course near Erie, Pa., were heavy metals, leaky 55-gallon drums of industrial waste, rusted automobile hulks, tires and old appliances, and there isn't a wedge in anybody's bag to get out of that jackpot. Except the government's. The course was carved out of an 80-acre former waste dump by money from the Superfund.

In the NFL, sometimes too much toughness masks serious injuries, making it tough on the teams' doctors. When Terrell Owens popped painkillers in an apparent accidental overdose, his actions and talk of a possible suicide attempt prompted some criticism that NFL teams fail to pay as close attention to their players' mental health as they do physical injuries. Well, the reality is that sometimes they also ignore physical injuries. Consider the plight of Tampa Bay quarterback Chris Simms.

If once is a fluke, twice is a coincidence and three times is a trend, three weeks into the NFL season several trends may have emerged. Defense appears to matter. Kansas City cannot stop anyone and is 0-3. Jacksonville can't score and is 3-0. The Chiefs were a trendy Super Bowl pick, based on a productive offense, a supposedly rejiggered defense and sentiment for everyone's favorite grandfatherly coach, Dick Vermeil. Well, Kansas City's defense is hemorrhaging points like a hemophiliac.

I received a voicemail earlier this week from a reader who said he was "shocked" to hear that the Tampa Bay Bucs had, in effect, kicked receiver Keyshawn Johnson off the team. He wondered if the San Francisco 49ers might follow the Bucs' lead by kicking receiver Terrell Owens, another pain in the backside, off the team. I thought about that for about two seconds and quickly came up with two reasons why the 49ers would continue to put up with Owens' antics and frequent embarrassing outbursts: 1. Owens is productive, a difference-maker, one of the best receivers in the league.

After all that has been written about the new generation of running quarterbacks and how Michael Vick and Donovan McNabb are the future of the NFL, the past four men at that position to win the Super Bowl are pocket passers. They are, in descending order: Brad Johnson of Tampa Bay (2002), Tom Brady of New England (2001), Trent Dilfer of Baltimore (2000) and Kurt Warner of St. Louis (1999). It was not remarkable to see three of those men lead their offenses to Super Bowl wins, but Johnson was an anomaly because he represented a departure in style for coach Jon Gruden.

Jon Gruden, the youngest coach in the NFL, is a notoriously early riser. Usually, it's just him and the crickets greeting each new Florida day. He seems to enjoy the solitude. It's allowed him to stew on concepts for success other coaches, some old enough to be his father, either don't have the time or the patience to create. "I guess now I can explain it all to my wife and kids," Gruden said. The willingness to commit is why the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, a franchise stuck in the swamp for many of its first 25 years, gambled its future (four high draft picks)

If once is a fluke, twice is a coincidence and three times is a trend, three weeks into the NFL season several trends may have emerged. Defense appears to matter. Kansas City cannot stop anyone and is 0-3. Jacksonville can't score and is 3-0. The Chiefs were a trendy Super Bowl pick, based on a productive offense, a supposedly rejiggered defense and sentiment for everyone's favorite grandfatherly coach, Dick Vermeil. Well, Kansas City's defense is hemorrhaging points like a hemophiliac.

While folks in Tampa Bay's environs chortle and make plans for a Sunday celebration, Gerry Fraley, writing in the Morning News, asks those in Dallas to ponder this about the Cowboys' new coach: "What was Bill Parcells thinking?" His point, a good one, is that Parcells was the Bucs' coach for something less than 48 hours last January, signed and sealed but never delivered because he asked for a couple of days to drive from New Jersey before the announcement. Maybe it was on the New Jersey Turnpike.